NFL Wins Best Sports League Award

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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NFL Wins Best Sports League Award

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Despite news about the terrible harm of concussions and the cheating of major players like the New England Patriot’s Tom Brady, NFL games are among the most widely watched among all sports in the world. In a recent Harris brand evaluation, the National Football League was ranked as the best Sports League Brand.

The NFL beat every sports organization from MLB to the NBA. Among the reasons may be that NFL games have much larger TV audiences, and that the day of the Super Bowl is all but a national holiday. Super Bowl 50 drew an average TV audience of 112 million. Some of the viewership may have been due to the fact that it was the last game played by Peyton Manning, who some experts believe was the greatest player in the sport.

Another reason for the popularity of the brand (which probably contributes to the Harris key evaluation measures: familiarity, quality and purchase consideration) is that most NFL teams are set in cities that have large populations. Adding their suburbs, the number has to rise by additional millions. The NFL has 32 teams. All large cities house at least one. And many have been around since before 1960, making the brand a particularly long-lived one.

The NFL is also a huge business. Its revenue runs above $13 billion.
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If scandals have hurt the NFL, it does not show.

Methodology: Measuring the health of brands over time, the EquiTrend Brand Equity Index is comprised of three factors — familiarity, quality and purchase consideration — that result in a brand equity rating for each brand. Brands ranking highest in equity receive the Harris Poll EquiTrend “Brand of the Year” award for their respective categories. This year, more than 97,000 U.S. consumers assessed more than 3,800 brands across nearly 500 categories.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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